Spider News: The Massive Spider Island Story Coming

Marvel unveiled a bunch of details last week about their next mega-event “Spider Island.” The storyline – which focuses on an infestation in New York City where everybody is given spider-powers – looks to be massive, with a number of new titles and existing ones reportedly tying into Amazing Spider-Man, dizzying both the collector side and the reader side of me.

It’s not that I begrudge Marvel for doing this. As I was reading news release after news release last week about all of the tie-ins, it got me thinking that this was probably the biggest Spider-Man event since 1993’s Maximum Carnage. Surely, it was impossible that Marvel had gone nearly 18-years between mega-crossovers with their most famous character, but then a recent interview with Marvel senior vice president of publishing Tom Brevoort confirmed my suspicions about the gap.

These mega-events/crossovers have always given me some pause as a collector – that’s part of the reason why I settled on just sticking with Amazing Spider-Man. If I bought and saved every issue that was relevant to the Spider-Man universe, I’d go broke and need to rent a separate house to hold all of the short-boxes. That’s why when people ask me about my quest, and want to know if I also collect other Spider-Man series, I tell them no. Of course, I have SOME of these comics – just speaking as a reader, why wouldn’t I want to own other series that tied into major events in Spider-Man’s life? For example, Maximum Carnage was a huge deal when it first came out because in addition to involving two Spider-Man villains who were huge with my classmates – Venom and Carnage – the series also pulled in other major Marvel characters like Captain America, Morbius, Iron Fist, Cloak and Dagger and others. I had to buy all of the tie-ins, because missing out on that felt like I was missing out on some kind of milestone event.

Of course Maximum Carnage ended up being a letdown. The abridged version: at 14 parts, Carnage just seemed exhaustive, with guest appearances that felt forced or unnecessary. Carnage is/was a one-dimensional character as is – a serial killer who bonds with parts of the alien symbiote that’s been torturing Spider-Man all the way back to Amazing Spider-Man 252. It’s hard to stretch so much content out of a villain who just kills for the sake of killing and while the storyline touched upon the whole “Will Spider-Man betray his values and actually ‘kill’ Carnage,” concept, I never remember feeling that engaged to Peter/Spidey’s ethical struggle.

I’m going into Spider Island with higher expectations, only because current head Amazing Spider-Man writer Dan Slott has recently taken the character in a different direction. Some changes have been more subtle than others. Taking away his Spidey sense powers – a move I still take umbrage with but will be interested to see how it ties into Spider Island – is obviously a bigger change for the character. But I also appreciate how Slott is also focusing on the Peter Parker character, giving him a real job and a new girlfriend. While the fact that Peter is a bit of a “loser” has always been a major component of the Spider-Man character, it was getting pretty pathetic before Slott took over as sole-writer, as it seemed like Spidey was just never able to catch a break in his personal life.

And like with Maximum Carnage, I don’t want to be left out of what Spider Island is going to offer this summer. We’ll see how much some of the more distantly-related miniseries like Cloak and Dagger and Deadly Hands of Kung Fu hold my attention, but I want to be open-minded here. And of course if there’s anything in any of these crossovers that ties into my passion/understanding of the Spider-Man character and universe, I’ll jot down a rambling passage like this one for all of you to enjoy.

I just can’t believe that it’s really been this long since the last major Spider-Man Marvel event. My collection was only in its infancy when Maximum Carnage launched – I probably didn’t own an issue that predated the late 1980s at that point. Is it just a coincidence that as I get into the home-stretch of my amazing quest that Spider Island is on the horizon? The big overarching theme I hope you get out of this site is that the notion of collecting Spider-Man comics is as much about a connection to my childhood as it is a hobby and an investment. Even though Maximum Carnage left me flat after the fact, the excitement I experienced around each subsequent issue – who was going to show up next? How was Spider-Man going to stop this guy – is still a very fond memory of mine. My anticipation for Spider Island is bringing me back to that place.

Mark Ginocchio is a professional writer and editor living in Brooklyn, NY. He's been collecting Amazing Spider-Man comic books since the late-1980s and launched Chasing Amazing in 2011 as a way to tell his story about Spider-Man, comics, collecting and everything else in-between. You also find Mark's writing at Comics Should Be Good at Comic Book Resources, WhatCulture.com and Longbox Graveyard. Follow him on Twitter for comic book chat @ChasingASMBlog.

The crossovers is what lead me away from comics in the early 90s, because I couldn’t afford everything on a $5 weekly allowance. Even now when I’m catching back up on issues of Amazing that I missed at the time, I find that I need to read Spectacular or Web to make sense of anything. I have the fantastic “40 Years of Amazing Spider-Man” cd-roms that are gold for reading entire comics – ads, bullpen bulletins, letters’ pages, etc – but when the crossovers start in earnest in the 290s, some of the fun gets sucked out of it.

Was Spider-Man involved in the crossover with the X-Men and others in the “Onslaught” event? I hardly read any of those issues, but I remember there being big buzz with some friends. Also, what about the Civil War thing? I guess those are 2 examples of “Marvel” or “X-Men” crossovers that may (or may not) have had Spidey in a guest cameo, rather than a Spider-Man event…

About The Author

Mark Ginocchio is a professional writer and editor living in Brooklyn, NY. He's been collecting Amazing Spider-Man comic books since the late-1980s and launched Chasing Amazing in 2011 as a way to tell his story about Spider-Man, comics, collecting and everything else in-between.